Last June or so Jive made a big bet on the iPad. It began with [Archived] Jive Present, an app focused on sales enablement, and today continues with the first release of a native Jive iPad app! The mandate for this effort is to ultimately deliver the full Jive experience. In essence, the new way to work on the new device for work.

What did we build?

It started with an SDK. We have a great set of APIs which provides the underpinnings for everything we do on the client side. Since we were starting from scratch, we took the time to build an iOS SDK as the basis for it both for our own benefit and as something we can open source. It's going out on GitHub and will be promoted on Jive Developers: Home soon!

The Design team took a decidedly user-centric approach. Since people often use their iPad for a mix of business and personal use, we wanted to stress the "it's all about you" aspects. It starts with the "Me" page with all of your streams, content, people, and places in one central place and will evolve into personalization down the road.

We also believe in not re-inventing the wheel, especially the beautiful ones in iOS, so we incorporated many of iOS's common elements into our app. For example, our Inbox functions much like Mail on the iPad with the familiar controls for editing and toggling read state. This was done thoughtfully to make the app intuitive and recognizable: Jive's core constructs + iOS's interactions makes for a happy marriage.

We also made it a goal to not just be an app for consumption. It must be great at creating content too. To that end we wrote an RTE for inline mentioning of people/places/content, content editing, and basic formatting.

I will post the app binary to the JC in the Jive for Mobile space. This is a new mode of distribution we have been testing with some customers who have internal enterprise app stores. The benefit is it allows the app icon to be branded and enables distribution via an internal app management system. Going forward, I will be updating the app in the JC on a quarterly basis.

What's coming next? Some highlights:

By the end of next week

We already have an update in the queue for Apple to approve. Tons of bug fixes and performance improvements.